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Article

Type inference for spreadsheets

Authors:

Martin ErwigAuthors Info & Claims

PPDP '06: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming

Pages 73 - 84

https://doi.org/10.1145/1140335.1140346

Published: 10 July 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Spreadsheets are the most popular programming systems in use today. Since spreadsheets are visual, first-order functional languages, research into the foundations of spreadsheets is therefore a highly relevant topic for the principles and, in particular, the practice, of declarative programming.Since the error rate in spreadsheets is very high and since those errors have significant impact, methods and tools that can help detect and remove errors from spreadsheets are very much needed. Type systems have traditionally played a strong role in detecting errors in programming languages, and it is therefore reasonable to ask whether type systems could not be helpful in improving the current situation of spreadsheet programming.In this paper we introduce a type system and a type inference algorithm for spreadsheets and demonstrate how this algorithm and the underlying typing concept can identify programming errors in spreadsheets. In addition, we also demonstrate how the type inference algorithm can be employed to infer models, or specifications, for spreadsheets, which can be used to prevent future errors in spreadsheets.

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Cited By

Flint SKeshk ADyer RBagheri H(2025)How do developers use type inference: an exploratory study in KotlinEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10585-y30:2Online publication date: 16-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10585-y
Williams JJoharizadeh NGordon ASarkar A(2020)Higher-Order Spreadsheets with Spilled ArraysProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-44914-8_27(743-769)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-44914-8_27
Bock ABiermann F(2019)Puncalc: task-based parallelism and speculative reevaluation in spreadsheetsThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-019-02823-8Online publication date: 23-Mar-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-019-02823-8
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Type inference for spreadsheets
1. Applied computing
  1. Computers in other domains
    1. Personal computers and PC applications
      1. Spreadsheets
2. Theory of computation
  1. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program constructs
      1. Type structures

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PPDP '06: Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming

July 2006

280 pages

ISBN:1595933883

DOI:10.1145/1140335

General Chair:
Annalisa Bossi
Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Italy
,
Program Chair:
Michael Maher
National ICT Australia & University of New South Wales, Australia

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 July 2006

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PPDP06: Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming

July 10 - 12, 2006

Venice, Italy

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Cited By

Flint SKeshk ADyer RBagheri H(2025)How do developers use type inference: an exploratory study in KotlinEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10585-y30:2Online publication date: 16-Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10585-y
Williams JJoharizadeh NGordon ASarkar A(2020)Higher-Order Spreadsheets with Spilled ArraysProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-44914-8_27(743-769)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-44914-8_27
Bock ABiermann F(2019)Puncalc: task-based parallelism and speculative reevaluation in spreadsheetsThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-019-02823-8Online publication date: 23-Mar-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-019-02823-8
Figuera MMurphy G(2017)ZenSheet studio: a spreadsheet-inspired environment for reactive computingProceedings Companion of the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity10.1145/3135932.3135949(33-35)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3135932.3135949
Sadaphule MShaikh N(2016)An application of database query translation into spreadsheets2016 International Conference on Electrical, Electronics, and Optimization Techniques (ICEEOT)10.1109/ICEEOT.2016.7755220(2861-2866)Online publication date: Mar-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICEEOT.2016.7755220
Sroka JPanasiuk AStencel KTyszkiewicz J(2015)Translating Relational Queries into SpreadsheetsIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2015.239744027:8(2291-2303)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2015.2397440
Cunha JFernandes JMendes JSaraiva J(2015)Spreadsheet EngineeringCentral European Functional Programming School10.1007/978-3-319-15940-9_6(246-299)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15940-9_6
Bécan GSannier NAcher MBarais OBlouin ABaudry BCrnkovic IChechik MGrünbacher P(2014)Automating the formalization of product comparison matricesProceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/2642937.2643000(433-444)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2642937.2643000
Cunha JMendes JSaraiva JVisser J(2014)Model-based programming environments for spreadsheetsScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2014.02.00296:P2(254-275)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.scico.2014.02.002
Flood DHarrison RIacob CDuce D(2012)Evaluating Mobile ApplicationsInternational Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction10.4018/jmhci.20121001034:4(37-65)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/jmhci.2012100103
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